This recent XKCD cartoon made me think of Miles Efron’s project on language change and information retrieval. Perhaps the tools he develops will help scholars in the future parse what we declaim to our tweeps.
This may be old news to some of the true social media junkies, but thanks to Gentry Underwood’s PARC forum today, I saw a great video analogy for the Facebook interaction style. Enjoy.
The video is made by a British comedy group called Idiots of Ants; the pun becomes evident when the group’s name is pronounced with a British accent.
(Please be aware that some ChatRoulette links may contain mature content.)
Dear me. All those folks doing naughty things on ChatRoulette, secure in their Net-anonymity, may suddenly meet a rude awakening: Chat Roulette Map, a new Google Maps mash-up, maps users’ chat image to their location, based on IP address. Last week, it also showed users’ ip addresses.
Note that Chat Roulette Map has just added a new pop-up window when you first load the page:
Welcome To Chat Roulette Map
(snip)
We’d like to advise maine.edu to stop using
student’s names in their hostnames.We’ve decided, at least for the time being, to
hide IP & host information as some user-identifiable
information was found in some entries.
No, you think? It’ll be interesting to see how this warning window evolves over the next few weeks.
December 10. Could not open box. Tried several times.
December 11. Co-worker took it to get charged. When she brought it back, Walt Whitman’s picture replaced the lady who was displayed earlier.
December 12. Could not turn on device. Accidentally discovered cable and plug in the packaging. Charged overnight through my laptop.
On Wednesday, I spoke about “From Photographs to Models: the Geometry of Image-Based 3D Reconstruction” as part of the Bay Area Mathematical Adventures (BAMA) series. I felt immensely honored to be asked to speak given the caliber of past speakers. Last night I felt even more honored when I discovered the high caliber of the students I was speaking to.
Why doesn’t the SIGIR web site have a search box?
This is a wonderful, whimsical video by Makoto Yabuki. (Via Ismael Chang Ghalimi)
White Box from Makoto Yabuki on Vimeo.
Exploratory search is like adding a search suspension, search tires, a manual search transmission, search bucket seats, and search steering wheel to your search engine. And, of course, search cup holders.
Caught at CHI 2009
The prolonged silence on this blog was due to my presence at CHI 2009, with its impoverished internet connectivity. It was a good conference none the less, one of the highlights of which was the Video Showcase program. I am sure other videos from this program will soon appear on YouTube, but for now, here’s the first one they showed:
It won First Place in its category (Best use of Jonathan Grudin’s head, or some such), and is truly funny.
Disclaimer: I didn’t have anything to do with the creation of this video, although I had been involved in building some digital ink interfaces in the 90s. The video was created by the following people:
Michael Bernstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Paul André, University of Southampton
Kurt Luther, Georgia Institute of Technology
Erin Treacy Solovey, Tufts University
Erika Poole, Georgia Institute of Technology
Sharoda A. Paul, Pennsylvania State University
Shaun K. Kane, University of Washington
Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft Research